Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)

My Lords, I will be even briefer, because much of what I intended to say has already been said. Obviously, I deal with this pretty much on a daily basis, back at the base in Bexley. As explained earlier, kinship care tends to have to be done much more quickly than a foster care placement. A foster care placement can go through a due process that will take much longer and will be very thorough, but kinship care tends to have to be much quicker. There are things that you might need to look at for a kinship care placement that you would not for foster care. Obviously, the kinship carer is seeking to look after a child they know. They are not looking to foster any child, which would mean that they would have to have a wide range of experience and therefore, no doubt, training to go with it. They may already be in a home that they will take the child or children into, so the accommodation might not meet the needs that a foster care panel might want it to. They may have a job, as has been said, and that will need to be worked around. They will not necessarily have made arrangements to take on a child, especially if it is a grandparent at an older age. All these things need to be considered. Frankly, kinship care and fostering arrangements are very different, which is why I support these amendments. This really needs to be looked at in a different way. I promised brevity, so I will now sit down.